What is xeon phi?

Xeon Phi is a line of Xeon CPUs manufactured by Intel, first released in 2011, that are classified as “manycore” and contain a large number of smaller cores to enable high performance by applications that are designed to be massively parallel. Initially offered as a PCIe add-on card codenamed Knights Crossing, the second generation of Xeon Phi processors, codenamed Knights Landing, was released in 2013 as a CPU socketed in a motherboard.

A single Knights Landing CPU incorporates 72 Airmont Atom cores, each capable of executing four parallel threads, for a total of 288 simultaneous threads per CPU, running at speeds between 1.3 and 1.7 GHz. The architecture supports up to 384 GB of 6-channel DDR4-2400 RAM, and up to 16 GB of 8-channel 3D MCDRAM.

Notable computers using Xeon Phi

As of early 2017, the world’s second-fastest supercomputer — the Tianhe-2, located in Guangzhou, China — uses Xeon Phi Knights Landing processors to achieve speeds of 33.16 PetaFLOPS.